March Against Monsanto, May 23, 2015

This is a Call to Action for a
Non-Hierarchical Occupation of Monsanto Everywhere

Whether you like it or not, chances are Monsanto contaminated the food you ate today with chemicals and unlabeled GMOs. Monsanto controls much of the world’s food supply at the expense of food democracy worldwide. This site is dedicated to empowering citizens of the world to take action against Monsanto & it’s enablers like the FDA, USDA, EPA, GMA, BIO, and the processed food companies that use Monsanto’s products.

Occupy Monsanto supports the March Against Monsanto!

EARTH – Saturday, May 23, a broad coalition of individuals and groups will gather in cities and towns all over the world, as part of a global March Against Monsanto. The intention of this march is to raise public awareness and bring increasing political pressure to bear regarding Monsanto’s corporate farming and business practices and…

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A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications.

The publisher is BioMed Central, based in the United Kingdom, which puts out 277 peer-reviewed journals. A partial list of the retracted articles suggests most of them were written by scholars at universities in China. But Jigisha Patel, associate editorial director for research integrity at BioMed Central, said it’s not “a China problem. We get a lot of robust research of China. We see this as a broader problem of how scientists are judged.”

Meanwhile, the Committee on Publication Ethics, a multidisciplinary group that includes more than 9,000 journal editors, issued a statement suggesting a much broader potential problem. The committee, it said, “has become aware of systematic, inappropriate attempts to manipulate the peer review processes of several journals across different publishers.” Those journals are now reviewing manuscripts to determine how many may need to be retracted, it said.

Peer review is the vetting process designed to guarantee the integrity of scholarly articles by having experts read them and approve or disapprove them for publication. With researchers increasingly desperate for recognition, citations and professional advancement, the whole peer-review system has come under scrutiny in recent years for a host of flaws and irregularities, ranging from lackadaisical reviewing to cronyism to outright fraud.

“The problem of fake peer reviewers is affecting the whole of academic journal publishing and we are among the ranks of publishers hit by this type of fraud,” Patel of BioMed’s ethics group wrote in November. “The spectrum of ‘fakery’ has ranged from authors suggesting their friends who agree in advance to provide a positive review, to elaborate peer review circles where a group of authors agree to peer review each others’ manuscripts, to impersonating real people, and to generating completely fictitious characters. From what we have discovered amongst our journals, it appears to have reached a higher level of sophistication. The pattern we have found, where there is no apparent connection between the authors but similarities between the suggested reviewers, suggests that a third party could be behind this sophisticated fraud.”

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“The committee, it said, “has become aware of systematic, inappropriate attempts to manipulate the peer review processes of several journals across different publishers.”

how annoying..and i thought all the science was settled and infallible..now we find out they cheat and lie..oh the horror!

“With researchers increasingly desperate for recognition, citations and professional advancement, the whole peer-review system has come under scrutiny in recent years for a host of flaws and irregularities, ranging from lackadaisical reviewing to cronyism to outright fraud.”

Fake research paper accepted into hundreds of online journals..open access peer review process is a joke

The dream of open access to scientific knowledge has come up hard against the truism that you can’t trust everything you read on the Internet.

A fabricated — and highly flawed — research paper sent to 304 online journals by John Bohannon, a science journalist at Harvard, was accepted for publication by more than half of them. The paper, about a new cancer drug, included nonsensical graphs and an utter disregard for the scientific method. In addition, it was written by fake authors, from a fake university in Africa and, as a final flourish, had been changed through Google Translate into French and back to English. Collaborators at Harvard helped him make it convincingly boring.

“Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless,” Bohannon wrote in the (paywalled) journal Science. And yet, his informal sting operation revealed, 157 completely missed the hints.

Their willingness to publish what was essentially complete B.S., Bohannon notes, may have something to do with open-access journals’ business model: Since they don’t charge their readers, the money has to come from somewhere. His acceptance letters often came with “publication fees” of up to $3,100. “It’s the equivalent of paying someone to publish your work on their blog,” he told NPR.

Only 106 journals, wrote Bohannon, performed any type of review; in those cases, the paper passed 70 percent of the time. When 36 that generated comments pointing out the paper’s flaws, 16 were accepted by the journals’ editors anyway.

From humble and idealistic beginnings a decade ago, open-access scientific journals have mushroomed into a global industry, driven by author publication fees rather than traditional subscriptions. Most of the players are murky. The identity and location of the journals’ editors, as well as the financial workings of their publishers, are often purposefully obscured. But Science‘s investigation casts a powerful light. Internet Protocol (IP) address traces within the raw headers of e-mails sent by journal editors betray their locations. Invoices for publication fees reveal a network of bank accounts based mostly in the developing world. And the acceptances and rejections of the paper provide the first global snapshot of peer review across the open-access scientific enterprise.

One might have expected credible peer review at the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals. It describes itself as “a peer reviewed journal aiming to communicate high quality research articles, short communications, and reviews in the field of natural products with desired pharmacological activities.” The editors and advisory board members are pharmaceutical science professors at universities around the world.

The journal is one of more than 270 owned by Medknow, a company based in Mumbai, India, and one of the largest open-access publishers. According to Medknow’s website, more than 2 million of its articles are downloaded by researchers every month. Medknow was bought for an undisclosed sum in 2011 by Wolters Kluwer, a multinational firm headquartered in the Netherlands and one of the world’s leading purveyors of medical information with annual revenues of nearly $5 billion.
But the editorial team of the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, headed by Editor-in-Chief Ilkay Orhan, a professor of pharmacy at Eastern Mediterranean University in Gazimagosa, Cyprus, asked the fictional Cobange for only superficial changes to the paper—different reference formats and a longer abstract—before accepting it 51 days later. The paper’s scientific content was never mentioned. In an e-mail to Science, managing editor Mueen Ahmed, a professor of pharmacy at King Faisal University in Al-Hasa, Saudi Arabia, states that he will permanently shut down the journal by the end of the year. “I am really sorry for this,” he says. Orhan says that for the past 2 years, he had left the journal’s operation entirely to staff led by Ahmed. (Ahmed confirms this.) “I should’ve been more careful,” Orhan says.

Acceptance was the norm, not the exception. The paper was accepted by journals hosted by industry titans Sage and Elsevier. The paper was accepted by journals published by prestigious academic institutions such as Kobe University in Japan. It was accepted by scholarly society journals. It was even accepted by journals for which the paper’s topic was utterly inappropriate, such as the Journal of Experimental & Clinical Assisted Reproduction.

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if the peer review process is dodgy you have turned a lot of things on their heads..thats why this stunt is so important..it shows that peer reviewed is not 100% fail safe..it doesnt mean its widely accepted by the consensus..it doesnt even mean its been reviewed!

According to the IPCC, climate change could halve yields from rain-fed crops in parts of Africa as early as 2020, and put 50 million more people worldwide at risk of hunger. [Pg. 2]

We looked to see if it was true. All we could find in the IPCC report was this.

In other [African] countries, additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change include greater erosion, deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000-2020 period, and reductions in crop growth period (Agoumi, 2003). [IPCC WGII, Page 448. 9.4.4]

Oxfam cite the IPCC, but the citation belongs to Agoumi. The IPCC reference his study properly:

There is only limited discussion of “deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture” in that paper, and its focus is not ‘some’ African
countries, but just three: Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. It is not climate research. It is a discussion about the possible effects of climate change. All that the report actually says in relation to the IPCC quote, is that,

Studies on the future of vital agriculture in the region have shown the following risks, which are linked to climate change:
• greater erosion, leading to widespread soil degradation;
• deficient yields from rain-based agriculture of up to 50 per cent during the 2000–2020 period;
• reduced crop growth period;

Most interestingly, the study was not simply produced by some academic working in some academic department, for publication in some peer-reviewed journal. Instead, it was published by The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

This is the fundamental problem

That the IPCC is citing non-peer-reviewed, non-scientific research from quasi governmental semi-independent sustainability advocacy organisations must say something about the dearth of scientific or empirical research. The paper in question barely provides any references for its own claims, yet by virtue of merely appearing in the IPCC’s 2007 AR4 report, a single study, put together by a single researcher, becomes “consensus science”.

This is not about Oxfam and this is not about the IISD – they are lobby groups who undertake research and advocacy work and so on. The IPCC have again been caught quoting second hand unrefereed sources to make their case. Generally there is nothing wrong with that, but the IPCC have set higher standards for themselves and we can plainly see that they are failing to maintain those standards.

This story must be wrong. The IPCC has just told us that there was only one error in the whole the Fourth Assessment Report.

.

Indeed. How much longer before people start referring to the ‘now discredited’ 2007 IPCC report.

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I can’t keep up with all the bullshit flowing now… raingate now… don’t forget… the IPCC got a Nobel prize for this report and so did Al Gore… grabbing unreviewed papers off the net and putting them in their report and calling it scientific fact…you losers!

“the IPCC is citing non-peer-reviewed, non-scientific research from quasi governmental semi-independent sustainability advocacy organisations must say something about the dearth of scientific or empirical research. The paper in question barely provides any references for its own claims, yet by virtue of merely appearing in the IPCC’s 2007 AR4 report, a single study, put together by a single researcher, becomes “consensus science”

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